What is "nominalization"

alt. (context linguistics English) The use of a word which is not a noun (e.g. a verb or adjective) as a noun, with or without morphological transformation, so that the word can now act as the head of a noun phrase. n. (context linguistics English) The use of a word which is not a noun (e.g. a verb or adjective) as a noun, with or without morphological transformation, so that the word can now act as the head of a noun phrase.

In linguistics, nominalization or nominalisation is the use of a word which is not a noun (e.g. a verb, an adjective or an adverb) as a noun, or as the head of a noun phrase, with or without morphological transformation. The term can also refer specifically to the process of producing a noun from another part of speech via the addition of derivational affixes (e.g., legalize versus legalization).

Some languages simply allow verbs to be used as nouns without inflectional difference ( conversion or zero derivation), while others require some form of morphological transformation. English has cases of both.

Nominalization is a natural part of language, but some instances of it are more noticeable than others. Writing advice sometimes focuses on avoiding uncritical overuse of nominalization, which yields "zombie nouns".